London

I'm having fun in London: I spent today visting Westminster Abbey and
the British Museum; yesterday I went to the Natural History Museum and
the Victoria and Albert; and the day before that I spent rambling on
Hampstead Heath. Tomorrow I'm off to Portsmouth, and on Wednesday I'm
meeting a friend for some walking on the Isle of Wight.

I'm staying with friends of the family in Highgate, right near the
cemetery and the Heath, and only a short distance from Central London.
Very much like a home away from home. Walking around London is quite
pleasant, so I haven't been using the underground that much; London does
have much better public transport than Sydney, though.

My trip hasn't gone entirely as planned, however. I came down with some
sort of weird disease and spent most of the first week in a high fever
-- I was running temperatures of 104+ for several days. Antibiotics fixed
that, but I also came out in a dense red rash, over my entire body.
They stuck me in hospital for two days and did blood tests (no results
yet) but the clinical diagnosis was Ricketsia, a tick-borne typhus
(Queensland Scrub Typhus). At first the 30 minute stopover in Bangkok
shopping mallairport was suspect, but now it seems
I must have been bitten by a tick on my last bushwalk. I
am now perfectly well except for a bit of a cough/runny nose, however.

So I'm not going to have time to fit in the parts of the Offa's Dyke Walk
and the Welsh borders which I'd hoped to see, but otherwise my itinerary
is largely unchanged: Portsmouth, the Isle of Wight, Southhampton,
Winchester, Salisbury, Avebury, and a trip to Oxford sometime. Then it's
off to Barcelona...